A Giant Among Men

‘Jonathan Swift,’ by Leo Damrosch

Washed ashore: A 70-foot model of Gulliver in Dublin, 2012.Credit
Photograph by Jack McManus/The Irish Times

Those of us at Harvard who took the seminar on Swift and Pope offered by the eminent scholar and specialist George Sherburn elicited the professor’s savage indignation as he returned our papers, many of which had called Swift ferocious. I chuckled, thinking myself innocent of the charge, until I received my paper with a furiously circled “ferocious” in it.

Was Swift ferocious? He used the Latin equivalent in his self-made epitaph, but that may refer to his many accusatory political pamphlets. His current biographer writes, “One of the last poems Swift ever wrote was the most ferocious of all.” Supercilious in his superiority and biting in his irony he certainly was. But he was also playful, fond of bagatelles, as he called them, in his correspondence with such fellow writers as Alexander Pope, John Gay, Dr. Arbuthnot and certain ladies.

The Harvard professor Leo Damrosch’s commanding new biography, “Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World,” does ample justice to a figure for whom religion and politics — the world — were even more important than literature and especially the other arts. (He had little use for music, theater, opera, painting.) Damrosch is gifted with a fluent style, sturdy sense of humor and acute guesswork in the many cases where facts are sparse or missing. His book supersedes even that of his former colleague Irvin Ehrenpreis, whose three-volume, 2,000-page biography he frequently quotes but often compellingly refutes.

Swift (1667-1745) distinguished himself as novelist, essayist, poet, satirist, epistolarian and political pamphleteer, failing to achieve only the two things he most desired: permanent residence in England versus hated Ireland, and a bishopric. Deeply involved in English and Irish politics, he was first a Whig (the party that countenanced dissenters), then a Tory (the somewhat more conservative party), and managed to pay for both ­partisanships.

Although basically a traditionalist, he was in many ways ahead of his time. Thus he was all for the learning and writing of women (who were then forbidden the university); he was active in promoting the cause of Ireland, though he hated it; and he advocated religious tolerance despite his own firm Anglicanism. The contemporary medical stance to the contrary, he was a hearty practitioner of physical exercise, often traveling on foot or horseback rather than by the customary coach or sedan chair. He opposed slavery, which was generally — even by Daniel Defoe — approved of. A churchman, he reached only the status of dean of St. Patrick’s (one of Dublin’s two cathedrals); he became resigned to and even proud of that mostly administrative office. He had become a cleric largely because it paid for his talents for writing and public ­speaking.

He achieved greatness with a permanent classic for both adults and children in “Gulliver’s Travels,” something matched only by Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe,” and with what is the greatest satire in English (and perhaps any language), “A Modest Proposal,” which proves by careful arguments — statistical, mathematical and social — that the solution to impoverished Ireland’s problems is the eating of babies and the selling of their carcasses.

At the same time Swift is a problem for reader and biographer because, as Damrosch notes on Page 178 (of 573), “the cast of characters in Swift’s life grew much larger. It can be hard to keep them straight.” Indeed, there are royalty and aristocracy, statesmen and politicians, clergymen and laymen, friends and enemies, the high and the low. And lots of women, from queens and duchesses down to servants and everything between, including two who were beloved. Trying to keep them straight may be impossible, but the story as told by Damrosch can be enjoyed regardless.

Swift excelled as a prose writer, for example in his radical, advancement-­costing polemic “A Tale of a Tub,” advocating “the sublime and refined point of felicity, called the possession of being well deceived, the serene peaceful state of being a fool among knaves.” Or in such pregnant statements as “We have just religion enough to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.” His aim in writing as in sermons was to be “understood by the meanest.” Thus he would read his writings aloud to his servants, and when they didn’t understand, rewrite until they did: “I write to the vulgar, more than to the learned.”

Of his poetry, there was the great Dry­den’s possibly apocryphal comment, “Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet,” borne out by Swift’s “Poetical Works,” which in the Oxford edition run to 682 pages. Technically accomplished versification, they may be remembered most for abhorrence of certain bodily functions when performed by an adored woman, as in his horror at Celia’s defecation appearing identically in two separate poems, which D. H. Lawrence was to make famous fun of.

Yet there is something almost poetic in Swift’s anger at his native Ireland, “the most disagreeable place in Europe,” “a wretched, dirty dog-hole and prison” where he expects to “die . . . in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.” But that was part of something greater: “Principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas and so forth. . . . I have got materials towards a treatise proving the falsity of that definition animal rationale, and to show it should be only rationis capax” (i.e., capable of reason).

Even his hatred of Ireland evaporated. At one time he could not walk the streets of Dublin without a couple of servants to protect him from verbal and even physical assault, but utmost popularity followed the publication of “The Drapier’s Letters,” a mockery of the English attempt to force a debased currency on Ireland (published pseudonymously, like much of what Swift wrote). There were bonfires and bell ringing on his birthdays, and he was treated as absolute arbiter of problems presented for his ­judgment.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Swift’s life is his love involvements, from an early proposal of marriage to one Jane Waring, a.k.a. Varina (he gave poetic names to the special ladies), who presumably rejected him for his lack of means, to much deeper relations with Hester Johnson and Esther Vanhomrigh, his Stella and Vanessa.

Stella was 9 when Swift became her private tutor; later, a lifelong friend. His “Journal to Stella,” an intimate series of letters to her and her dull companion and chaperone, has become fairly popular. Popular too was the contemporary opinion that Swift and the quite younger Stella had been secretly married, though others insisted they had not. There is no proof either way, although it seems they were never without the company of a third person. The letters are distinguished by charming baby talk, their “little ­language.”

The even younger Vanessa, on the evidence of her own letters to Swift, was passionately in love. Swift often tortured her with long failures to respond or unromantic answers, although there were intimate meetings and at least one ­proto-love letter. Others may have been destroyed by the executors. Stella died in her 40s, Va­nessa in her 30s. Afterward there were numerous surrounding and platonically adoring women, his so-called seraglio.

Unhappily, Swift was plagued throughout his life by serious health problems. Chief among them was Ménière’s disease, leading to frequent vertigo, tinnitus and progressive deafness, eventually total in the left ear. The last, extremely painful years were tragic, with loss of memory and severely impaired movement, culminating in his servants’ displaying him to gawkers for money. He even had to be forcibly restrained from tearing out a sore eye.

He did, however, have some good friends, although usually quarreling even with them in the end. Some distant female relatives cared for him at the last. His self-­authored epitaph, a translation of which Damrosch provides, is worth quoting:

“Here is deposited the body / of Jonathan Swift S.T.D. [Sacrae Theologiae Doctor] / of this Cathedral church / the Dean / where savage indignation / can no longer / lacerate his heart. / Go, traveler, / and imitate, if you can, / a valiant champion / of manly freedom.” Someone else might have added “and great ­writer.”

JONATHAN SWIFT

His Life and His World

By Leo Damrosch

Illustrated. 573 pp. Yale University Press. $35.

John Simon, a longtime critic of the arts, is the theater critic for The Westchester Guardian and The Yonkers Tribune.

A version of this review appears in print on December 1, 2013, on page BR22 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: A Giant Among Men. Today's Paper|Subscribe